With rising coronavirus cases and a cash-strapped governorate,
Russia’s healthcare system may be developing some serious cracks.  

An Associated Press report which covered Russia’s response to the coronavirus crisis has indicated that  the virus attack is proving to be too tough for the government to handle there. 

The report called the country’s healthcare system “vast yet underfunded” and spoke to professionals and other academics to probe what lies beneath the heavyweight’s lacking performance with respective to the pandemic.  

“Across the country, 81% of hospital beds that have been set
aside for coronavirus patients were full as of Wednesday. Three times last
week, the Russian government reported a record number of daily deaths, and the
number of daily new infections per 100,000 people has more than doubled since
Oct. 1, from 6 to over 15,” the Associated Press reported.

The report concluded that some of the reasons for deteriorating situation in Russia could be because of bureacratic reasons.

Earlier, Russian President Vladimir Putin had cautioned the
authorities against sweeping ugly details under the carpet and urged them to take
calls independently on ways to control the spread of infection.

“Colleagues, you have received broad powers for implementing
anti-pandemic measures. And nobody has relieved you of personal responsibility
for the adopted measures — I really do hope that they were adopted on time,”
was Putin’s message to the governors last week,” as quoted by AP.

Yet, despite a singular freedom granted to them, the
governors are still not free to act on their own because of a legacy of a
chronically centralized system and lack of funds, it wrote.

“All the finances have been long centralized, and the
regions don’t have spare money,” the AP report quoted Abbas Gallyamov, a
political analyst.

“So de jure, a governor’s hands are untied, but de facto
they’re still tied because they don’t have the money to impose a lockdown and
compensate people for their financial losses.”

The wait time for ambulance and dearth of beds in hospitals
is telling across districts, it found out in during its interviews with healthcare officials.

“Such risks we’re taking! Telling patients (with milder
cases) they can go and treat themselves at home, when they may come in three
days later with their lips blue,” Dr. Tatyana Symbelova, the chief doctor at Republican
Infectious Disease Hospital in Ulan-Ude, told AP.

 “We’re very seriously
choking,” she added.

The country imposed its only lockdown in March, and since
then has relied on social distancing, wearing of masks, and avoiding of crowded
places as their methods of avoiding the spread of coronavirus.

Russia has so far recorded over 2 million cases and has had 35,000 plus deaths since the inception of the pandemic.